


New Games To Play

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 08:00:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1502843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’ve made a thin blue line on Vriska’s cheek and, like you’ve just slammed her shut in a book, she goes still. At the end of your claw, there’s a slip of smeared blood to match, and a tremble goes across your skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Games To Play

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stunrunner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stunrunner/gifts).



> I finished this and then realised that it took a less violent turn than was wanted. I'm so sorry, but I hope it still catches the spirit of the prompt and the pairing, anyway.

You’ve made a thin, blue line on Vriska’s cheek and, like you’ve just slammed her shut in a book, she goes still. At the end of your claw, there’s a slip of smeared blood to match, and a tremble goes across your skin.

Both you and Equius liked to group things up and draw boxes around them, and he told you about his. He told you that, where you were in _his_ boxes, you stopped him from giving in. You are why he has never covered his hands with the quick, warm blood of the reds and browns and yellows.

“I bet you’ve never done that before, huh?” Vriska angles back into animation and she smiles. You have been shown something deep and dark. The impact of your claw against her cheek still tingles in your fingers. You flex them, and then you shrug the tension out of your shoulders. You don’t exactly want to claw your own head open to get at the unpleasant prickle in your pan, but she does push a tension into your muscles.

“I’ve had blood on my claws, befurr.” Just as well because ‘claws’ doesn’t really count as a catpun.

“But it wasn’t troll blood!” replies Vriska. She’s scrawny inside her clothes, and her lines look straight even as she tries to slacken them. Her metallic arm stays immobile, even in comparison to the rest of her. “Animal blood means nothing because animals are easy to get the better of.”

You’ve never killed another troll, but Vriska has never needed to use her agility and weight against something six times as big as she is. Even though troll hide probably splits relatively easily in comparison to things with layers of fat and fur, you don’t think you’d know how to break somebody’s pan the way Vriska does even if you did have the right abilities.

“I just wanted to help you.” Vriska’s voice softens and the spikes of her teeth are shortened by her lips. You like to examine what people really mean, but sometimes they don’t make sense at all, and just slip through your fingers. Vriska seems like she might be too fluid, but, somehow, she just flickers, instead. “This is what you need to be learning, Nepeta.”

Equius has a lot of weird hesitant spikes, and Vriska is possibly what it would be like if you were to bend those outwards, instead. He talks about her and assumes that you probably don’t understand. You do, after all, have to take on faith that there’s much difference at all between his blood and hers.

“I’m not stupid.” When you say this, something clamps down, hard, and Vriska gives a flash of a snarl before she grins, again. You aren’t sure how much you should be noticing.

“I knoooooooow that.” She rolls that one good eye and then she turns softer again. Softer for her, anyway. “You know that I talk to Equius, right? _He_ thinks you’re a delicate little thing. I don’t, and I told him I don’t. This is me helping you.”

You feel like somebody is brushing your fur the wrong way and this is less physical, somehow, than it was when she was trying to get inside your head.

“I don’t need any help, Vwhiskers.” Behind her, there’s a vaguely sBurb unreal tree, and you wonder what kind of noise anyone would make falling against it. If anybody had ever told you that they were thinking anything like that, you would have rolled it around your pan, luxuriously.

“Every one of us could be better. That’s part of my purpose, here.” You know how sudden impact feels. How it swells in the head and flares around the horn roots.

“I don’t think that’s true,” you reply. There’s probably scars underneath her clothes, but there’s definitely scars under yours.

She snorts and, when she throws her head back, it forces the dramatic tangle of her hair to tumble. “C’mon, we do have to win, somehow. Who else will do it? Terezi? Fat chance. Sure, she’ll be okay up to a certain point, then her lead is all her own. After that, you can’t trust her at all. Who else do we have after that? Kanaya? _Karkat?_ That bunch of sorry excuses we have for highbloods?”

You twitch your fingers and say nothing. Your claws slide together with a gritty scrape and the cut on Vriska’s face is bright against her skin.

“Then we have trolls like Tavros, and don’t you think he needs just a little bit of guidance? Or even a lot?” She gives a kind of sighing giggle and you feel like you might boil. “This isn’t some silly roleplay scenario, Nepeta. You aren’t going to get to be some cat and then go back to your hive and play games. This is real life. So let me help you.”

Your planet is so much more static than the plains of Alternia, so everything really is still for a moment. Even fighting imps seems a lot less organic than hunting beasts.

You hit Vriska straight across the face with the back of one of your claw sets. The yield of the skin is different on contact, since they are blunter than the frontside. Her head snaps straight back and her eye widens, bright like something watching you from the undergrowth.

Vriska sags a little, shoulders curving inward with one hand fumbling up to her nose. That single eye winks at you as blood seeps from between her fingers and slides down to her top lip. You breathe, a tight shiver caught in your bones. You could walk away from this and find some imps to slay.

“See, I knew it would help you.” There’s no extra letters anywhere, there. “Now doesn’t it feel like you’re learning?”

With your other hand, you hit her again, forcing her head to whip in the other direction, the fall of her hair hiding her face. “I don’t know why you all think I don’t know things,” you say. “I’ve catually learned so much about this.”

“Oh, really?” You feel something brittle move between the two of you.  Instead of leaving, you take a couple of steps and then turn back, and you aren’t even sure how much you had to do with that. “There’s more danger out there than you even know, Nepeta.”

Your insides are molten and you can’t move, except a little twitch of your fingers. Vriska is still clutching her face, and that bright eye staring at you from between her fingers is beginning to bruise black. It makes you consider her other one and its mass of scar tissue. Your skin bristles in your stasis.

“Nepeta.” She’s close to you, pressing up against you and is both shorter and narrower than you. You feel where she has a core, though, as well as the serrations of her robotic arm through her shirt. “Nepeta, I know you can’t _actually_ beat me, but this is really, really good for you to learn.”

Her fingers are strong as they curl around your arms, one in muscle and gristle, and the other in wire and metal. When she slides a razor across your pan, you know where you’re supposed to stand. “It’s the way it is. You’re, what? At the bottom of green. I can at _least_ help you be the very best of that.”

She half smiles, her teeth just about prodding out over her thin bottom lip. Even with the blood running down her chin, it seems like it should be soft. But you’re held still with her claws digging into your arms and she’s sliding slowly around your pan.

You swipe at her torso, catching your blades on the front of her shirt. Vriska’s crooked, injured nose twitches irritably. Underneath the slits you’ve made, there are fine blue lines on her stomach, each of them still more shallow than the one on her face. Your claws get tangled up in the material and you don’t pull them away without tearing Vriska’s t-shirt almost up to the neck. Only the collar remains intact.

Vriska hooks her fingers around the frayed edges of the shirt and grimaces, her teeth stained blue. You should go and work on some quests, instead. Equius is probably waiting for you, somewhere.

When you hunt and the sky is purpled by the sunset, you feel electric bright. You told Equius, once, that you might be able to get lost in it. He told you that was probably ridiculous, but you imagine that he stops you, anyway. This is a frayed, dark inverse of that feeling.

Vriska frowns when she can’t quite cover up the strip of grey that runs downwards from the collar at her throat. Your eyes are drawn to the scored lines on her abdomen, just below the arc of her ribcage poking through the skin. She’s like a leaner creature than you, her danger lying flat against her bones.

She’s the first troll to snarl at you. It wasn’t like you ever had any competition when you were hunting, and the other trolls you’ve met since don’t seem to find you at all threatening. The noise of her doing so sinks, with an unfamiliar shame, into your chest. You think that you can learn things from Vriska, but just not the things that she says she wants you to learn.

The sound she makes against the tree behind her is solid but smooth. There’s none of the textured rumple of the bark of a real tree. Vriska clearly feels the impact when she cracks against it, anyway. The look she gives you is a pained and bloody squint.

 “I’m going to go, now, Vriska.” It’s not like you personally intended to fight Vriska Serket, after all. “If I hear from Terezi paw Kanaya, I’ll tell them you’re here.” Behind you, she gives a round sigh.

This time, she holds you delicately in the centre of your pan, but as if she’s intending to squeeze. “You can’t just walk away, Nepeta. You can’t start this and then leave me, here. What’s wrong with you?”

Your mouth still moves and so does your tongue. “Nothing. I don’t want to do this, anymore, I’m going to go. Equius is looking for me.”

Vriska goes frozen still for a moment, like when you find something that’s too small to kill. “Wow. So you’re going to do this and leave and go back to your moirail and be all cute, sweet Nepeta, again?” But when she steps forward and swings you back towards that tree, you’re not even sure she uses her hands.

Because you have spent sweeps being thrown off of huge creatures, you know that you have time to brace for impact, here. Vriska repeats another step, this time in pressing up against you. Like this, you can better feel the pulse beneath her skin. Your own pulse beats with the heat under your skin. She smells sharp like cold blood and new sweat and her eye darts and settles on your mouth.

“Well, hey, if you like your games. I think we should play one.” Her thin face is close to yours, flushed blue. Even the acid in your gut moves with your heart, and your breath catches. She clutches your shoulders, finger curling around them, slowly.

Then she kisses you, and you feel her teeth before you feel her lips. It’s pressured and wet, and you feel pushed back and far away. You’ve never kissed anyone, before. Her tongue darts out and you feel it twitch against your tooth. Without thinking, you catch it, and taste blood in your mouth.

Vriska grips her mouth and hisses. “What the fuck, Nepeta, that hurts!”

You shrug, still distant, and wipe your sleeve across where you can still feel the wet of her mouth.

Vriska watches you do that, her lip curling up. “Fine. Be that way. I thought you liked romance and stuff.” She sighs, and you watch her chest rise and fall.

“But I nefurr wanted that. “ You stare at the untorn collar at her throat and you’re annoyed at just how abrupt it looks like that. “Just because I write on walls doesn’t mean I want you to kiss me.”

Exasperation makes Vriska tilt herself back, and the two sides of the shirt begin falling away from each other. Even when she does that, nothing shows. “No, I guess you’re just happy being weirdly interested in my love life. And everyone else’s, apparently. You could actually be into something that’s useful and not really fucking weird.”

She swallows her words when you hook one claw underneath her collar. It was almost on instinct, but you continue and tear through it, anyway. The shirt sags around her collarbones, exposing her small breasts. They’re shallow and unremarkable and, on her, somehow, you feel like you’ve caught sight of her intimate seams. And you’re someone who often found it easier to hunt shirtless. But you guess you’ve never seen another troll this naked.

Vriska looks down at herself and doesn’t attempt to make herself any less vulnerable to you. “Ahahaha, I guess even cute little Nepeta isn’t above everything.”

She grabs your wrist and all her bones are narrow, like silver under her skin. You’ve grown enough in the last couple of sweeps that your skeleton is sturdy even underneath your muscle, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference.

It doesn’t even occur to you to pull your hand away when she grasps your claws and then brings them up. They rest against her naked chest, the tips of them fanning out across her skin. You feel the light, soft pressure of it, and you think you could dig.

“So, do you want to scratch me, again?” They make pale blue dips where they press. It would look like some kind of risky exposure if you didn’t know that she was in your head, again. That is just enough that you know she’s there. She tilts her head. “You probably want to tear me open.”

You’re not sure whether it matters whether you want to or not. That deep bubbling dark place isn’t much fun. There’s a reason why you have never been interested in blackrom. Vriska jerks your wrist so that her breast is against your palm, barely there like baby chirpbird feathers. You pull your hand away and growl. And you’ve never heard yourself growl quite like that.

You push her – she lets you – back against the tree, again, even in all its fakeness. You kiss her, again, and this time, you know you’re less distant and there’s a round, warm tension in your gut. You feel her spindly hand work its way underneath your shirt, where she holds your left rumblesphere, and it’s almost as if she doesn’t know how to go about doing that.

She wriggles against you, and you suddenly miss the climax of a battle being a slit throat.


End file.
